


the exit / or the home

by clytemnestras



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-20 08:36:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15530382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: this is my Becoming





	the exit / or the home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nereid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nereid/gifts).



In the end, she's still his. 

 

Except, in every way she is not.

  
  


*

 

She is a God. 

She is not granted a childhood. She is birthed, fully formed from the dead kings they overthrow. (When the first humans unfurl themselves from the stone and the seas, she knows this day will come again. The worshipful have to kill their Gods to take their place. It is a cycle, and she watches as her siblings, her children, make a world to match.)

 

She builds herself out of fire and solid rock, tops the mountain like a holy star. She is a Queen, birthed fully formed with her hand shaped into a fist.

 

*

 

When she bathes in the cloud - never lower, never the ocean, she does not know what of her brother she can trust - she stretches her body far, wide, fills herself with the feminine curve of it. That form is hers to shape, malleable, with peaks and valleys, life-giving fire resting in the loins. She carves her softness in the wash of cloud, never shivering but warm in her womanliness.

 

All this flesh, the half that covers the earth and pollutes it with humanity, belongs to her. 

 

(She wants to cultivate it under her own careful hands. She wants to watch it spread like a fire until she can raze the whole earth to the ground.)

 

A peak meets a valley, a contradiction of breast and stomach flesh. She contradicts, naked, and laughing.

 

*

 

He loves her, in the way love and hate and create and destroy are synonymous. He loves her in the way he forces her hand into marriage, the way to her he will always be a fragile cuckoo crying into to her breast for warmth. The way he cannot love without destroying it, so too does he destroy her, and she vows to the blood of her marriage bed that she will destroy all he is, too.

 

As he fucks a child into the belly of a mortal, it is an act of scorn and of worship. As the first of his bastards grows as a parasite in the warmth of his poor mother's womb she doesn't want to destroy her, not for his sake. But she presides over family and his infidelity is an act of war. All Gods know this.

 

It is her duty to destroy what he creates outside of their bond. Their marriage should be as the mountain, instead it is as shining as gold, and just as soft. She tightens her fist around his wrist, around his throat, as she holds him down beneath her.

 

“ _ I am your Queen _ ,” she tells him, her thighs locked bruisingly to the bones of his hips. “ _ I am your Goddess in marriage, my fire can consume you. _ ”

 

He pulls her close, floods her, quivers against her breast like a newborn babe. She strokes the marks her hand has left around his neck; a dark tattoo, a wedding ring. He is predictable and breakable, but he always puts himself back together.

 

He clears his throat, mouth open in a smile so the battle might begin again.

 

“ _ I am your King _ ,” he tells her.

 

“ _ You are my consort _ ,” she replies.

 

He loves her the way they ever were. The way they ever will be.

  
  


*

 

(After, as they are fallen, as they are ghosts to the world long turned toward new Gods, she feels her immortal soul shake in the breast of a young thing, in the body she wears like it could ever fit her vastness. He is near, after a century apart she can feel him like a shadow twin, a brother, a lover, a husband tied to her soul.

 

He kisses her on the mouth before he speaks. She slaps him before she utters a word. They must choose these things carefully.

 

“I want a divorce,” he laughs, “You’ll be my fifth this half century.”

 

“I’ll be your last and you damn well know it.”

 

He holds her waist like he owns it. She pulls his hair like he wants her to.

 

Her dominion is  _ Them _ \- so long as they rotate on this destructive axis, she will live and thrive.)

 

*

 

She writes the legend of herself on the walls of her temple. She learns from her husband, her brothers, that to be loved is to be feared, so she picks the latter and builds a religion around her rage. 

 

It is not for nothing hers was the first roofed temple - they want to contain her, hold the chaos of her down, to keep her wisdom and her righteousness for themselves. 

 

Wisdom. They say she is  _ wise _ because she is placed at the head - not like Athena, her owl-eyes, her solid shoulders which can hold all the lines of battle within them, not like Aphrodite and her love language and knowing arches of spine, hip and throat. She is the Woman at the head of the world, the marriage bed, the mothering hand, the barren and starving breath that takes away as quickly as it gives.

 

She is the hand, open and fisted. In another world, she and Eris might have been lovers.

 

In the next, they might be.

 

She kills a mortal whilst her husband watches. She curses another whilst his divine bastard weeps. She grants favour on her worshipers, those who remain sacred to one another blessed with stability, family, wealth upon wealth. 

 

She watches her husband's lovers die, her brother’s acolytes implode at his hubris. She laughs until the sky feels thunderous.

  
  


*

 

They die, but they never will. They slip in and out of mortal bodies the way birds duck and weave in the heavens.

 

She dies when Greece is at war with a new faith, and she dies through the cannibalism of the Roman Empire.

 

She lives in the suburbs of America as the nuclear family sends toxicity rolling through the hills. She flexes her wrist, a bracelet clasped around it that had been a ring when she was bigger than the sky.

 

It rests against her bones more solidly, now. 

 

*

 

He marries her beneath his daughters moon, eclipsed and red as the blood in her vessel’s arteries.

 

His jacket is powder-blue, his stubble grey, his face laugh-lined.

 

She wears an open bowtie, a tailored coat, a chiffon skirt. 

 

He is so proud to lift her by the waist and kiss her on high, like the cloud, arms like towers. He wants to make a house out of her. She wants to build from his body a home.

 

“Til death,” she breathes into his throat.

 

His body is dead within the year. She thinks the customs might have changed, but she sticks to black until she changes faces, wearing white only when it thunders and red when it quakes. She thrives in the power of a widow, bound and yet free.

 

The bruises on her hips last longer than he does, and she presses on them silently in the dark.

 

Divorce and remarriage pump her fat on worship and empty calories, empty promises. The institution turns like the world does.

 

*

  
  


She lives and ends - 

 

Dies but never dies. She vows in human flesh that soon she will devour the new Gods.

 

She lives -


End file.
